Re: Reverse Dns Question...is it really necessary or not? - TCP-IP

This is a discussion on Re: Reverse Dns Question...is it really necessary or not? - TCP-IP ; Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
> SF> AOL refuses incoming email for servers that have no rDNS,
> SF> so it's not exactly oddball mailadmins doing it.
>
> Many would point to that as evidence that it was *exactly* ...

Re: Reverse Dns Question...is it really necessary or not?

Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
> SF> AOL refuses incoming email for servers that have no rDNS,
> SF> so it's not exactly oddball mailadmins doing it.
>
> Many would point to that as evidence that it was *exactly* oddball mail
> admins doing it. AOL has a *long* history of adopting ill-conceived and
> half-baked measures in this field.
>
> http://homepages.tesco.net./~J.deBoy...-anti-ubm-dont
> -work.html#SourceRouting>

Excuse me?!? What on $DEITY's Green Earth are you talking about?

When I implemented the anti-source routing checks, I did so because they
were causing massive problems for our users and our system, being massively
abused by spammers and preventing us from being able to properly generate
the bounces.

The only people hurt by this change were a couple of LISTSERV mailing lists
who were unable to immediately change the return address they were
generating, and I worked with them to find alternative solutions. Seeing
as listserv.aol.com was one of the biggest listserv machines on the 'net
and was being run by a friend and co-worker just down the hall, and I was
the guy responsible for helping him to keep the machine running, it was in
my best interest to make sure that the LISTSERV problems got fixed.

Reverse DNS? Depends on just what exactly you're checking. Are you
checking that the name claimed in EHLO/HELO matches the reverse DNS?
That's probably a bad idea (and explicitly prohibited by the RFCs). Are
you checking that there is some sort of reverse DNS, whatever it is?
That's probably okay.

Before you go shooting your mouth off about the sorts of things that AOL
has or has not done, you might want to do your research.

I've had plenty of bad things to say about the stupidity that AOL has
participated in the past, but these two so-called examples are *NOT* it.